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Cell Tracking

Cell Tracking

Can the government use your cell phone records to track your physical location without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause? Often with EFF input as a friend of the court, the vast majority of judges issuing public opinions on the matter are saying “no”, and rejecting government applications for cell site location tracking information made without showing sufficient need for this kind of sensitive information.

This issue came to light in August 2005, when the first judge to publish a decision on the issue—Magistrate Judge Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York—publicly denied a government request that lacked proof of probable cause. In doing so, Judge Orenstein revealed that the Justice Department had routinely been using a baseless legal argument to get secret authorizations from a number of courts, probably for many years. Many more public denials followed from other judges, sharply rebuking the government and characterizing its legal argument as as "contrived," "unsupported," "misleading," "perverse," and even a "Hail Mary" play. But the government continues to rely on the same argument in front of other judges, most often in secret and sometimes successfully.

EFF has been asked to serve as a friend of the court in several of these applications, successfully showing judges how and why the government's arguments are baseless. EFF will continue to serve as a resource to courts and to counsel, to protect your privacy interest in your physical location, to stop the government from turning the cellular phone system into a vast network for warrantless physical surveillance and to ensure that Big Brother stays out of your pocket.

Since the California legislature passed a 2015 law requiring cops to get a search warrant before probing our devices, rifling through our online accounts, or tracking our phones, EFF has been on a quest to examine court filings to determine whether law enforcement agencies are following the new rules...

Do you know where you were five years ago? Did you have an Android phone at the time? It turns out Google might know—and it might be telling law enforcement. In a new article, the New York Times details a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure...

It’s hard to talk about the vulnerabilities in cellular technology without increasing the amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There is already much uncertainty around cell-site simulators (CSS, aka Stingrays), their capabilities, and how widely they are used. Partly this is because of the veil of secrecy that has...

San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched a virtual reality (VR) experience on its website today that teaches people how to spot and understand the surveillance technologies police are increasingly using to spy on communities.“We are living in an age of surveillance, where hard-to-spot cameras capture our faces and...